It was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery, against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit: the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.
Douglass reflects on the moment he understood the deliberate mechanisms used by white slaveholders to maintain the enslavement of Black people.
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It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.
We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.